


In Your Eyes, Let Me (Not) Disappear

by Puniyo



Series: Concubine [4]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: 1st POV vs 3rd POV, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Realism, Pagan Rituals, Psychological Drama, Sort of prologue, Unresolved Sexual Tension, alternative universe, changes of POV, mention of sexual situations, relationship triangle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 14:42:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17347100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Puniyo/pseuds/Puniyo
Summary: You are thinking that I want to run away but the night doesn’t scare me. Yes, my whole body is shivering but we are standing in the dunes, you and I, and the wind is threatening to cut my feet with the rising sandstorm. Dance, you tell me, dance until the wind is pleased and I will be forgiven.Yuzuru, Javier's favorite concubine has left the imperial palace. Will the emperor recover his dragonfly?





	In Your Eyes, Let Me (Not) Disappear

**Author's Note:**

> Dear all, a little snippet before diving into a major installment for Concubine. See this as some sort of quiet prologue for major events that will happen later. This is the result of a very frustrating day of work so please forgive me for all the incoherence.
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of FICTION. In no ways it reflects the opinions of the author and the people mentioned.

You are thinking that I want to run away but the night doesn’t scare me. Yes, my whole body is shivering but we are standing in the dunes, you and I, and the wind is threatening to cut my feet with the rising sandstorm. Dance, you tell me, dance until the wind is pleased and I will be forgiven. Why me? What is the offense for the guillotine on my neck? I am a shadow, you lift my chin, and I can see myself in your eyes. You say I am beautiful, yes I am. You say I look at you with pride, why should I not be? You say ‘don’t look at me like that’, but yes, I will. I will. A million times I will until you finally see who I truly am. Take my eyes if you want, gauge them out and wear them in your waist like the silk threads and the jade coins of your empire.

The back of your hand is strong against my cheek and so quick that the pain hasn’t reached me yet. I still don’t close my eyes and I dare you to hit me again. Hit me. Hit me until I bleed to see if my defiance will wither out. You do without hesitation. Your slap on my other cheek burns like a shard of blue ice and I bite my tongue, tears immediately flooding from the corners of my eyes. ‘Is it this what you wanted?’, I don’t answer. You order me to open my mouth and I do. You press your thumb on the bruise, your nail right on the cut of my tongue to see if you could tear it even more, and I can’t swallow with your pressure on my jaw. It is my blood, my saliva, my tears that spill and run down my chin and your fingers to the sand and to your wrist.

I am beautiful, you repeat, as you violate my mouth. Also ugly and hideous and your finger goes deeper to my throat. My eyes are finally not proud and you are so elated that you retrieve your digit and I can finally breathe. I’m coughing, choking on my own redness, on the liquid iron that overflows, spit and salt, and I want to hit myself for all the times you have done so. You pull my hair back, and the trail of tears on my abused cheeks are rivers of silver under the moonlight. So beautiful but so beastly. ‘Have you played enough?’

If I say no, will you punish me again? I lower my gaze and I nod, the sting on my flesh is still as intense as before. You don’t need my obedience, you assure me. ‘I need your everything.’ I nod once more. ‘My everything and my nothing.’ I turn around, taking a few steps away from you and I kneel down. I’m stepping on the sand and small empty shells prickle my toes. I bring them to my lips but there are only crystals left on my palm. ‘Don’t move. Dance. Dance for the wind.’ I extend my arms to the sky and I let the gusts guide me to where they want me to be.

I am a branch of blossoming cherries that sways at your will and the shrunken twig of cinnamon ready to be broken by your anger. Haul me by my waist on your current and let each of my steps be heavy as the cooling lava so I can jump as light as a feather from your forest. Rip from my lungs the breath of life you envy and stab me with the venom of your gale. Please hate me until eternity finishes. Please forgive me. ‘My Yuzuru.’

I stop as you whisper my name in my ears, your embrace so foreign to me and yet I let my weight fall upon your chest. My body is still trembling but I don’t know why. You caress my cheeks, the mark of your fingers still upon them and you apologize, over and over. I listen to them in silence, your fake prayers and asthmatic wails, and how I am lullabied by the lies in them. ‘Will you give me your loyalty, Yuzuru?’ You know you have it. It gave it to you. It is yours forever. You open my tunic and your hands run all over me, from my ankles to the shins and my inner thighs, my sensitive sex that you dwell just a second longer and then up to my navel, my ribs, my collarbones. There isn’t a part of me that you haven’t touched. It is not pleasure you want to give, you tell me. It’s a remembrance of who I am now, and a memory of who I will be tomorrow once the sun conquers the day.

I don’t even notice when your hug has started to push me forward, your grip so forceful that I think my bones will crumble under your cradle. You have taught me to navigate in the darkness but why are you giving me directions now when you never did? The wind has halted all its parades and I can now hear the murmur of water. It’s not a hymn or the cords of my zither being plucked. The waves are roaring and crashing on the shore. Where are you taking me? ‘Have you ever flown?’

No. Please. I don’t want to fly. You order me to keep walking but I am scared. The night has never betrayed me, but will you? ‘My Yuzuru.’ This is not you. You are being enchanted by the cries of the sirens by the waves and their promises of foam. Please. Please stop. The precipice is so tall. My eyes are finally everything, you tell me. They will be, everything and nothing. I will be everything and nothing. The fan and the blade. The boy that gives birth and the girl that walks in graves. The man who kills with his tongue and the woman who heals with her bosom. I cannot fly. ‘Yes, you can.’ The dirt at my feet rolls down the ravine and I can’t hear the echo. The ocean ate it. The sea will eat me too. Please. Am I crying again?

‘It’s okay, my Yuzuru, it’s okay.’ To become one with Nature, I will fly, you say. Your lips are wet too when you kiss my neck. Are you crying too? One more step and I will fall. Please don’t let me go. The moon is not even reflected down there and the horizon is becoming blurred. I am frightened. I am scared. You have started counting and I can feel the heat of your whole body distancing from me, only the palm of your hand on my back, between my shoulder blades. Three. Please don’t go. Two. ‘Do you regret it?’

I shake my head as I inhale too much air, shooting the scent of the seaweed up my nose and the dread down to my stomach. ‘Fly, my Yuzuru.’ Your hand is quivering too but I can’t hold it when you push me over the edge. The air hurts so much, even more than when you had hit me, that I close my eyes immediately. And suddenly there is nothing but water. Everything is so quiet except the water. I try to open my eyes but it burns. Where are you? I can’t hear you. I cry for you but the water is gagging me. I can’t drink anymore, please stop. Please. I can’t breathe. I can’t touch anything. Only water. Please. I’m scared. Only water. It hurts so much.

Please save me.

 

 

Yuzuru wakes with the earthquake of his contracting diaphragm and a gasp on his lips, inviting his soul to return to the vessel of blood and flesh, in mazes of veins and nerves. His heart is sprinting a race of its own with a finishing line on his ribcage and each uncontrolled beating is a needle on his temples. His back is drenched, his legs and his chest too, not of the sea but of his own sweat. A gentle hand catches the droplet on the bridge of his nose and the sleeve dries those on his forehead.

‘Can you breathe?’

He nods, closing his mouth and seizing the rising hiccough. The embers on the fugacious pyre are the only glow of the night, the orange on the ashen charcoal fighting for the last sparks. Yuzuru rests his forearm on top of his eyelids, the total darkness uncannily comforting. There is a distant howl that lurches on the breeze that mocks his flimsy appetite for forgotten vows. He chuckles at the misery of his own rebellion.

‘Give me water.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

The first sip from the bamboo is almost sweet, sliding down his throat easily and engulfed by the walls of his stomach. But the ocean is wild and he never learned to tame it. The second mouthful is acid and the water corrodes his palate, twisting his guts in its impetuous currents, and he chokes on the whimsical terror again, spilling the drink on the soil of the forest. His quiet sobs echo in the hollowness of the disguised trunks, seeping to the roots of the willow trees.

Patrick runs a hand through Yuzuru’s hair, drawing the younger man to his chest as they lay down together, side by side, in the mantle of feral hare’s fur. He tucks the much shorter locks behind his ears, tiptoeing on the scalp and the back of Yuzuru’s neck, as the panicked breathing recedes back into a rhythm matching his own.

‘Do you still think of him?’

‘There is no one.’ The younger man nudges closer, folding himself on the warmth of the embrace. ‘It was only a dream.’

‘It is always the same nightmare.’

‘It is just a dream.’

Patrick lifts his chin, their gazes meeting in the faint light of the night. He places a chaste kiss on his own fingers and they brush off the remnants of tears in Yuzuru’s long eyelashes, painting them on his flushed cheeks and stopping on the bow of his upper lip, before retrieving his hand and kissing the knuckles again.

‘We used to think the forest was ours to have.’

The young man smiles, nodding gingerly without uttering a word. He turns around to the fire, to the last ribbons of crimson and yellow, and the crackling twigs under them. He grabs a small piece of charcoal, blazing but not burning his palm. It falls apart on his grip, the unspoiled blackness marking his skin and the dust slipping through his fingers.

‘Patrick–‘

‘It could still be ours.’ He buries his face in the strands at Yuzuru’s nape. ‘You cut it.’

‘I am returning to the East.’

‘Because of him?’

The flames are too weak to consume the large chunks of wood and they perish as Yuzuru mouths _Javier_ in silence. The string of smoke contorts in the air and the blend of the aftermath burnt sandalwood diffuses above him and in him, reminding him of the imperial quarters.

_I don’t want any other consort. Be only mine. Be my concubine._

‘Nature has called us back.’

‘Nature has always loved you.’ Patrick leans forward, the young man’s back to his chest, spine to sternum, the mark of the stag seeking for the scar of the flower of the night.

‘Please.’ Yuzuru recoils in himself even more, his svelte frame almost disappearing in the surrounding void. For brief milliseconds, he thinks he is alone, standing on the precipice again.

‘Will you ever be mine?’

Will he ever only belong to himself, Yuzuru wonders. The soles of his feet for the silver mud and every sigh of penance for the wind, the chief’s blade on his shoulder and another slap from _him_ , Patrick’s hands on his manhood for a blessing and Javier’s own length on his mouth for the blissful curse. To reside in everyone and to be part of none.

‘I’m tired. I want to sleep.’ He closes his eyes, pretending to have drifted into another realm where he was free and he could fly.

‘Sleep Yuzuru.’ A kiss on the dark hair. ‘You’re safe here.’

 

 

_My emperor._

The stem of the swan quill breaks under his thumb even before he finishes the last stroke on the parchment. A maddened groan ricochets on the rice paper and when it returns to his lungs, Javier refuses to swallow it. He shoves the porcelain well to the floor, the ink smearing the fractured pieces and the wood in the pattern of a wing. It is dark the paste, just like the eyes, the alluring eyes of his consort, dangerously secret and excitingly savage.

The portrait in front of him, of the man in yellow robes in the jade throne, seems to mock him with his all-knowing smirk, patronizing in his posture and condescending in his title.

‘Isn’t this what you always wanted?’ He almost throws the lantern at the painting just to see him burn.

 

_The empire will crumble, Javier, like a child’s castle in your hands._

_I will not let it happen._

_It is written in the stars. The dawn of the fireball from heavens that will consume all the seas and dry our rivers. And you Javier, you will watch your people die in the flames of their own wrath._

_Why are you giving me the empire?_

_It is written in the stars too. My end to your beginning. Everything to nothing._

_I will not sit here and pray to the skies like you do. I will be everything for my people. There will never be a day where they won’t smile at their fortune. I will be everything._

_You will be everything, Javier. But the empire will crumble one day. Because you will never be nothing._

 

He closes his eyes, massaging his temples and smothering the wrinkles of his frown. The night is silent and the fluttering of the cicadas disrupts the serenity of his own quarters. An empire of golden harvests and ripe channels, of fruits that roll to baskets and fishes that jump to boats – the stars must be wrong.

‘Yuzuru finally left.’

The delicate steps of the empress sweep across the room in a stealthy pace that he does not even notice when she had entered. The hem of her long robe brush over the spilt ink, destroying the pattern of the wing.

‘No one leaves the court without my permission.’

‘So you finally expelled her.’

‘What are you doing here?’

She sits on his lap, her arms wrapped around his neck. Barren from the makeup powder on her cheeks and the dyes on her lips, she looks young in her insincere innocence, her eyes in the shades of autumn leaves but not dark. She is beautiful, Javier thinks, but it is the beauty of the night that he longs for.

‘Am I not your empress?’

‘It is late. You should–‘

Her mouth presses to his in an urgent call for his attention, muting his baritone. She continues in her clumsy licks on the emperor’s closed lips, in the despair to reclaim his affection. Javier kisses her in a fervor she had never known, his fingers prying open her tunic in an almost animalistic haul. The loose strands of her hair, not dark, fall over her shoulders, and he closes his eyes, pretending they are, dark like the petals of a flower that bloomed only at night, as he dives his faces into her exposed breasts, biting and sucking the perked nipple. She yelps in pain amidst her rising pleasure but he continues the pathway down to her navel, the trail of his nails coarse and dragging streaks on the supple skin of her belly, her pelvis, and he penetrates her with his finger, burying it inside of her.

Inside of him. Inside of Yuzuru’s tightness that would clench him with his heat and make him never want to leave that haven. Yuzuru, whose eyes fogged with lust would beg for release and Yuzuru who would dance for him with the cage of pearls around his sex. Yuzuru who denied to offer his virgin mark and Yuzuru who dared him to take it. Yuzuru, his concubine, and Yuzuru, the prey for his hunt. Yuzuru, Yuzuru, _Yuzuru_.

_My loyalty._

‘You’re too rough, Javier.’

He opens his eyes, the sight of his empress’ trembling thighs and the high-pitched frenzied complaint shattering the cruel illusion on his mind. He retrieves his finger and he takes a deep breath, suppressing his erratic pulse and the growing strain of his erection confined in his own garments.

‘I’m not a man.’

He chuckles, the expelled air modulating into an almost hysterical laughter. ‘You’re definitely not one.’ You are definitely not him, he whispers, but the words are only for his lamentable self. ‘Leave.’

‘What? No.’ She leans forward for his lips again but Javier diverts his face, the coldness in his gaze masquerading the yearning for another body. ‘Where can you go? She is not in the palace anymore.’

‘I never left Yuzuru.’ He lifts the empress to her feet, tying her tunic once again to cover her nakedness and he places a chaste kiss on her forehead. ‘Leave. You need rest.’

‘You promised my father you would take care of me! He chose you!’

‘I promised him I would take care of the empire.’

‘I am part of it too!’ She fondles him by the groin, grabbing his member desperately as the choleric tears threaten to fall. ‘I am this empire too! I am your empress! Yuzuru is nothing!’

_Because you will never be nothing._

‘Please leave.’ He secures her by the wrists, a kiss in each, detaching her quivering silhouette from him. She is petrified on the ring of the dried ink on the floor as Javier walks by her, not once turning back.

The night is still the same when he steps outside, the eerie silence soaked into every corner and the constellations playing hide and seek with the clouds. At the final hours before dawn, the court is dormant, under the spell of the slumber deities. Except for Javier, except for the young emperor who smiles sheepishly as he rides his golden maned horse out of the gates to the eclipsing shadows of the forests of the East.


End file.
